Archive

The Zap Alias won the on-line poll for the most attractive car, but this car is far more than just a pretty face. An efficient and quick three-wheeled side-by-side, this electric vehicle carries a 32 kWh advanced lithium-ion phosphate battery made by one of the largest BEV manufacturers in the US, yet it still weighed in at a modest 2733 pounds. This car showed innovation in both its design and execution, yielding excellent performance and efficiency. Class: Alternative Side by Side No. of wheels: Three Passengers: Two Drive type: Battery electric, front-wheel-drive Battery type: 32 kwh, lithium-ion Charging: 110v or 220v Thankz for the great video, XPRIZE! Watch more videos at the XPRIZE Foundation YouTube Channel.

A video production team from Earth2Tech Media’s Green Overdrive came out to ZAP on Monday to test drive our latest vehicles and meet ZAP Alias XPRIZE driver Al Unser Junior. Katie Fehrenbacher and Chris Albrecht also caught up with ZAP CEO Steve Schneider and Founder Gary Starr.

Fehrenbacher acknowledged that ZAP is one of the oldest electric vehicle companies out there and asked Starr about ZAP’s initial approach. Starr said ZAP started in 1994 by focusing on affordable electric vehicles, introducing electric bicycles, scooters, ATVs, trucks, then eventually cars. During the segment Fehrenbacher has some fun on ZAP’s smallest EV, the wheel motor driven ZAPPY3 electric scooter.

Later Fehrenbacher caught up with CEO Steve Schneider, touching on media reports critical of ZAP’s “failures” in delivering electric vehicles, a question that completely ignores the fact that ZAP has delivered over 117,000 of a broad range of electric vehicles from bikes, to scooters, to trucks.

Q: Katie Fehrenbacher: You talk a little bit about being misconstrued as a marketing company and a little bit about some of ZAP’s failures – SS: Mis-categorized — in being able to scale up manufacturing wise and I think there’s been a variety of dates missed on commercial productions that’s been widely reported…”

A: Steve Schneider: And I don’t think if you looked at any other auto manufacturer that is introducing a vehicle, that the dates that we targeted, (and we’re not a manufacturer; we had the contracts but we had third parties to deal with besides ourselves, but I don’t think you could come up with a manufacturer that hasn’t come out with a product that has missed their target date and had control of their manufacturing), we never had control of our manufacturing, so we always gave the target dates that our contract manufacturers had given to us. And so, because of those things and missing those target dates, we focused very heavily in the last 18 months to have our own manufacturing capacity so that we can control that. We still might miss a target date like everyone else, but at least we’re in control of it, we were not in control of it before.

Katie Fehrenbacher: So you’re doing this partly for environmental reasons, becoming a do-gooder after a lifetime of driving race cars.

Al Unser Jr.: I’m doing this mainly to develop the automobile in the area of alternative fuels and getting away from the addiction to the petroleum products.

KF: What do you think of it compared to a gas based car?

AU: I loved it , the major difference first and foremost is how quiet it is; there’s just no sound coming out of it. And it’s instant power, I noticed that the torque is very high on it, when you drive the car, it drives just like a regular car, except again for how quiet it is, it’s just super quiet.

KF: You think that’s a good thing, you don’t miss the big, booming engines?

AU: Not at all.

Learn more about the ZAP Alias Team entered in the Progressive Insurance Automotive X PRIZE on their Team Blog.

Al Unser Jr. has lived a pedal-to-the-floor life, toddling around the pits as his famous father raced around the track, winning his sport’s biggest prize twice himself, becoming a teacher to the next generation of open-wheel stars.

So when he was asked to gear back during the Automotive X-Prize, a competition that’s supposed to be more innovation than acceleration, well, you know what happened.

“I just wanted to see what it could do,” Unser said.

Curiosity is what got Unser behind the wheel in the first place, pairing a man used to high-decibel, low-miles-per-gallon speed machines with a Star-Wars-pod-looking prototype electric car not much louder than a dishwasher.

Turned out to be a perfect match.

It started two years ago, when a friend told Unser about the Zap Alias, a prototype electric car that could hit freeway speeds and had a range of 100 miles.

The two-time Indianapolis 500 winner was intrigued by a drawing of the car and contacted Zap, forming a relationship between one of the fastest drivers in the world and a company at the forefront of alternative-fuel transportation.

So when Zap needed someone to drive the Alias in the Automotive X-Prize, a $10 million competition to develop super fuel-efficient cars, Unser didn’t hesitate.

“I told them I’d love to be a part of it,” he said.

There is a certain irony to Unser’s pairing with an alternative-fuel vehicle.